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9 Tips on How to Create Awesome Content that Is Easily Discovered

There are so many wonderful things about the digital age in which we live, and we’re lucky to have an ever-growing abundance of information at our fingertips.

The job of sharing news and valuable information no longer resides solely with professional journalists; more and more self-promoted bloggers are taking to the web-a-verse to share their opinions and insights.

Power to the people! While this shift of power away from traditional media outlets opens a lot of doors for bloggers, it has also resulted in a glut of online content. That’s a problem if you are trying to get your content noticed. But there are things you can do to make sure your content gets the attention it deserves.

Here are nine tips to get your content to stand out from the crowd:

Keep Your Ideal Audience in Mind – Always create great content with your ideal customers in mind—will this information be valuable to them? If not, how can you craft the information so that it will interest them? If you use personas in your marketing efforts, consider the various personas, their individual interests, and unique needs.

Opt Out of Updating Old Content; Make New Posts Instead – If you’re blogging about a developing story or continuing topic, create a new post rather than updating the old page. You can create a series of blog posts with a specific theme, like we have with our PPC Experts Interview Series or the Google AdWords Ad Extension blog posts. Link between the old and new pages for easy navigation.

Use Online Data to Discover Trends – Twitter provides great real-time data about what topics are trending and what people are buzzing about, and Google Trends gives insight into the hot button topics people are searching for. Creating content with this online data in mind will keep you in the loop and allows you to optimize your content for those trending search terms.

Pay Attention to URL Structure and Title Tag – Including the keywords you want to rank for in your URL and title adds a nice SEO boost.

Evaluate your Top Content – PPC experts know how important it is to continuously test and track an ad’s success (or lack of). Testing allows you to discover what is and what is not working in your advertisements. Evaluating your top content is the same idea. Examine your top-ranking pieces and try to see why those posts did so well. Did you include several images? Was it a timely news piece? Did you include a great offer?

Make it Easy to Share –Imbed Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ buttons on your content pages so that visitors can easily share them via social networks. We’re all far too busy and/or lazy to copy and paste.

Use Dynamic Content and Internal Links – Increasing on-site discovery is important in boosting page views and time on site. You can suggest relevant topics to visitors through the use of dynamic content (most shared topics, most viewed topics, etc.). Internal links and relevant anchor text also make it easy for your visitors to discover additional content and navigate seamlessly throughout your site.

Insert Long-tail Keywords – Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases made up of three of more words. Long-tail keywords are easier to rank on than head terms (one or two word phrases) because they are more specific. Inserting long-tail keywords into your content is a handy technique for driving targeted, relevant traffic.

Don’t Skimp on the Media—Inserting media like images and video into your content can help you rank higher in the SERPs. You can use an image’s alt text to insert SEO keywords, but even more valuable is that many search engines, including Google, show multi-format results at the top of their SERP pages. People also love to share and “like” videos.

Implement some of these tips and see how it affects your content’s ranking. As always, content is king—your pieces won’t ever get too much attention if they don’t offer valuable information that interests people. However, when you’re creating great content that just doesn’t seem to rank, these tips might be just the boost you need to get your content noticed.

Comments

Colin clear

Dec 22, 2011

Hi Megan
I understand the important of creating valuable and informative content but one thing you do not mention is where to post the content.
Generating inbound links by posting quality content on relevant sites is a perfectly valid form of SEO but finding good quality sites to put the content can be a problem
Would you recommend any ?

Hi Colin,Sorry for the late reply. Usually the best place to put your top quality content is on your own site- after all, the whole point of SEO is to drive traffic and attention that helps boost your site's ranking.As far as guest posts go, it probably depends on your business' industry. Sites that do blog posts regularly are usually happy to have a guest post sent their way now and then to lighten their own load.Hope that helps!

Hi Megan, Awesome tips on good SEO copywriting practices. This article has all the right ingredients that will ensure your content is unique, catchy, and search-engine-friendly. Thanks for sharing such helpful tips. I look forward to reading more in the future! Best regards, Manny - Search Ranking Pro

In my eyes, udpating old content can be a very good thing. Sometimes you have a article, that is a great resource and is getting new links, likes, tweets, etc. every week. Why would you not update such a piece of cornerstone content? Else you can run into keyword canibalization, because you have a dozen articles who all target the same keyword.